Haystacks can be round or rectangular depending on local traditions or modern tools but always designed to store and protect hay (grass) from the elements in harsh farmland environments. The grass is collected, sorted and structured to ensure it is accessible when required. Haystack’s regular shapes contrast with the natural landscape – like beacons of order in a chaotic world of mud, machines, and manure. In the cleaner but equally chaotic world of the Building Internet of Things (BIoT), buildings flooded with sensors create cascades of information flowing towards big data analytics engines. If unsorted or badly sorted, it accumulates into a thick data mud, which makes it slow and complex for systems to find the insights they are looking for. However, an open source initiative named Project Haystack is streamlining the process of working with data from the IoT. “Macro trends in technology are making it increasingly cost-effective to instrument and collect data about […]